Social Conservatives Attacked for Soft Paternalism

Slate’s Matt Yglesias sees the attempts of Ross Douthat and other social conservatives to incentivize marriage as analogous to Arizona’s SB 1070, a law meant to make the lives of illegal immigrants so awful that they would up and self-deport. He writes:

The big problem with this idea, however, is that it involves deliberate cruelty to innocent people, which is morally wrong. So wrong that you never see conservatives explicitly avow it. Because it’s really obviously wrong to be deliberately cruel to innocent people.

So beyond that, you’re left with … what? Marco Rubio’s idea is that we should reallocate EITC funds to make the program more generous to married parents and less generous to single ones. But per Rubio’s own analysis of the situation, the one-parent families he’s penalizing are worse-off!

Judging by his indignation over Senator Rubio’s tax policy and Ross Douthat’s ideas in Grand New Party, Yglesias seems to view any attempt to penalize an undesired behavior or reward a desired one as necessarily punitive or vicious.

But these policy recommendations resemble the tactics of former Mayor Bloomberg and Nudge author Cass Sunstein. The goal isn’t to punish people for making a bad choice, but to tweak their incentives so far fewer people wind up making the sub-optimal choice in the first place.

Of course, it’s possible to describe any paternalist law as an act of retribution (Cigarette taxes are a deliberate attempt to be cruel to people who are already addicted to a drug, so you wind up using their dependency to take away more of their money and make them worse-off!), but this ignores the fact that cigarette taxes are as much about discouraging potential or casual smokers from taking up a heavy habit as they are about squeezing the drug budget of the two-pack a day set.

When soft paternalists go after quantifiable goals like obesity and sodas sizes, educational attainment and preschool, and retirement savings and tax-sheltered 401(k)s, the modest penalties and incentives usually pass without scandal. But when politicians and pundits try to monkey around with the social and economic costs of a lifestyle choice, the backlash can be enormous.

In his internet-infamous anti-pot column, David Brooks didn’t propose any civil or criminal costs for using marijuana. He tried to marshall the softest kind of paternalism: social censure. Whether or not the current drug laws need reform, he argued, we shouldn’t be approving about more people using marijuana.

But the online backlash seemed to have read a different column, where he had endorsed the Rockefeller drug laws, just as Yglesias seems to think that Douthat favors re-criminalizing adultery, or bringing back the term “bastard” for illegitimate children.

Social conservatives turning to Sunstein-style nudges could help culture war fights approach détente. Negotiating over incentives and pricing externalities means negotiating over the height of the barrier to some questionable activity, not access to the activity altogether. Thus, neither side need treat the question as an existential threat such as in the all-or-nothing legalization/criminalization dichotomies.

Yglesias et al. should welcome this shift in tactics, and recognize it from their own playbook as a moderate way of shaping culture. They should give Douthat and Brooks a small reward for good behavior, rather than trying to delegitimize and disincentivize their approach.

“Encouraging” behavior is poor policy regardless of who, how and why. Carrots and sticks is waste of time, so better to just concentrate on enforcing laws on the books dealing with crime rather than social behavior.

This is walking a fine line. You want to encourage “good behavior” but you don’t want to make the lives of people, especially children even more miserable than they already are.

Our tax policies should encourage good behavior up to a point. Taxes are really for raising revenue for the government, and if the government engages in too much social engineering, we may be lapsing into a soft tyranny. Nothing like the Nazis or Communists of course, but I am wary of a government that is too muscular and too interested in the details of its citizens lives.

It is really not a good idea to defend Brooks. He was not suggesting the establishment of some sort of roving tut-tutting machine. He was endorsing the continuation of the grotesque and unjustifiable destruction of families and of lives to prevent something for which he disapproves, having tried it in his youth and changed his mind about. It is a great pity he cannot be arrested for his past criminality,and then get a sense of the real impact of the cruel and vicious policies he supports.

“Yglesias seems to view any attempt to penalize an undesired behavior or reward a desired one as necessarily punitive or vicious.”

Punitive or vicious is a bit strong. But the government has no business penalizing or rewarding any legal behavior. Government subsidies to impoverished single parents are not about behavior. They are about hungry children. Rubio doesn’t care about hungry children. He cares about pandering to social conservatives and the rich who resent public assistance to the poor.

Over a century of experience has shown that social engineering schemes are usually flawed in their primary premise, namely that human beings are little more than stimulus-response mechanisms.
Rather than tax incentives and penalties, the idea of social censure, as deriving from the ordinary customs and morals of a community work far more effectively as social controls.
However, here we are in the 21st Century, when nobody will admit to morals of any kind, and when a once-revered figure like Pope Francis tries to renormalize both sexual and economic ethics, he is pummeled by Left and Right for goring the oxen of the punditry.
Until we can agree on what is or is not moral, we will continue down the sorry road of commercial hedonism. Alas.

When soft paternalists go after quantifiable ills like obesity and sodas sizes, educational attainment and preschool, and retirement savings and tax-sheltered 401(k)s, the modest penalties and incentives usually pass without scandal. But when politicians and pundits try to monkey around with the social and economic costs of a lifestyle choice, the backlash can be enormous.

Consider what you’re comparing here – obesity and soda sizes are dealing with decisions people make that are of personal consequence to themselves alone. Same with retirement accounts and 401k’s. Educational attainment and preschool paternalism is all about providing more resources to those who otherwise wouldn’t have them.

If you’re more generous to married parents, and less generous to single ones – you’re basically reducing the opportunities available to children from single parent homes … on the grounds that children with married parents are already in an advantaged situation.

It is nonsensical, unless you’re simply looking at it from the angle of “how do we stop welfare queens from having more kids to increase their take of the government dole?” Which admittedly, to the extent that’s a real problem, is a legitimate question. It’s just that the tool you choose seems poorly chosen if your true target is improving opportunities for children.

Not so much a question of paternalism – but about whether your paternalism is intelligent, or knee-jerk reactionaryism.

In his internet-infamous anti-pot column, David Brooks didn’t propose any civil or criminal costs for using marijuana. He tried to marshall the softest kind of paternalism: social censure.

Really? That’s why he was promoting government tipping the scales? And decrying that those discussing legalization were only focusing on “the health risks users would face or the tax revenues the state might realize”?

Punitive or vicious is a bit strong. But the government has no business penalizing or rewarding any legal behavior. Government subsidies to impoverished single parents are not about behavior. They are about hungry children.

They are about behavior whether they are intended to be or not.

“Don’t worry about unintended consequences and incentives” is the cry of sentimental fools.

Fortunately, there is a solution that does not involve penalizing children.

The thing that concerns conservatives is the possibility of making welfare a viable lifestyle, where someone who is dependent on public assistance can start a family, and where the kids will go onto public assistance when they are old enough. In other words, creating an entire dependent class whose only “contribution” to society is take from it, and who increases its numbers of the public dime.

It’s a kind of John Stuart Mill moment. (See Joseph Hamburger on Mill’s dual-use social pressure.) The pressure of enlightened opinion is okay, even mandatory, but the pressure of tradition and custom is wicked. The wicked may not nudge, nor may they do anything much at all. (I think that’s the implicit rule.)

Glaivester said
‘The thing that concerns conservatives is . . . creating an entire dependent class whose only “contribution” to society is take from it, and who increases its numbers of the public dime.’

There are several things you are missing here. Firstly, conservatives have never had a problem with creating a ‘dependent class’. In fact, the idyllic 1950s society created by democratic New Dealers and loved by conservatives, was built by setting apart married women as a ‘dependent class’ who did all the unpaid care work that men earning a family wage had neither time nor emotional wherewithal to do. What you are objecting to is a certain type of dependence. In fact, if you define ‘contribution’ entirely as ‘paid work’, then all homemakers are a dependent class whose only contribution to society is to take from it.
Secondly, you are also wrong about the ‘contribution to society’. As Senator Mike Lee has recognized recently, families with young children are doing the important work of raising the next generation of taxpayers, and ought to be compensated for it. Instead of unloading on them with scorn and spite, why not try to think of ways to help them perform this vitally important contribution to society?
You can go on about how ‘dependent’ they are, but let’s be honest, we all need others to care for us in ways we cannot care for ourselves. The difference between you and me and these women is not that they are dependent and we are not. It is that our dependence is nestled within structures of economic privilege that allow us to turn other citizens into our paid wards (wives, care workers, nannies, etc.). The men in these women’s lives are useless, and cannot help them economically or emotionally. Is it really so bad for their fellow citizens to give them a helping hand to do the socially valuable work of raising families? I for one am happy to be the responsible citizen and help these women raise the next generation.

The problem with applying this logic to single parenthood is that you end up not just “penalizing” the parent but also the child

Whatever minor “penalizing” might be done to the child by policies such as establishing additional child tax credits for married couples hardly compares to the crushing burden of coming from a single parent household. And that’s exactly what these proposals are trying (gently) to minimize for others in the future.

“Secondly, you are also wrong about the ‘contribution to society’. As Senator Mike “Lee has recognized recently, families with young children are doing the important work of raising the next generation of taxpayers, and ought to be compensated for it. Instead of unloading on them with scorn and spite, why not try to think of ways to help them perform this vitally important contribution to society?”

I don’t think Sen. Lee looks upon little children and says to himself “There’s goes the next generation of taxpayers!” If creating taxpayers what you wish then perhaps the government can go one better and set-up baby farms to produce as many taxpayers as possible. And soldiers and sailors and pilots too.

I knew few people who start families for the tax benefits. All these little tweaks to the tax code we speak simply to the complexity and confusion and basic unfairness of it. Government should not be picking winners and losers as a lifestyle choice anymore than it should be favoring the oil and gas industry with the same kind of tax policies.

I guess I’m getting dull eyed. The current system makes people dependent sheep and steals their incentive to thrive. Adding more funds just makes them more dependent and encourages bad behavior. Switching the benefits to another group is ‘picking winners and losers’ and is a vicious penalty to those ‘stuck’ in their current position.

Every single policy is going to hurt someone, in some way. Those people will rage against it.

No, this isn’t a request for nihilism. It’s just stating that people will have reasons, and some good ones, to question why to do any action. The solution is sometimes to go with the plan but be ready to handle the results.

The soft-paternalisms, like tweaking ETIC to support people improving themselves and/or married over single with kids is a viable option. However, we WILL have the issue of what happens to the current single parents with kids.

Personally, I prefer instead of just moving money around, decide on what we WANT these groups of people to be able to do, then supply support in areas that’s holding them from doing just that.

I.e. Say you want single parents with children to have the basics-food, utilities, so if the parent works. Meanwhile, you want to see married families be able to maintain the ‘one spouse works, the other stays home’ move to encourage caring for their kids.

It makes the ETIC swap not as beneficial as other options. Instead, you’ll want to make sure food stamps and energy assistance is set up to handle basic needs, perhaps consider pegging it to having a job, if even part time (partial income matching?), and day care aid to encourage the child being watched whiel the parent works.

Meanwhile perhaps move the child tax credit towards married-filing-joint where one of the parents is a homemaker.

Makes it so that the ‘less desired’ actions are supported but in a controlled way while more ‘supported’ traits are given more freedom in handling their resources.

In the least, declaring just how you want each of these groups to live will help show where you are coming from.

“Cigarette taxes are a deliberate attempt to be cruel to people who are already addicted to a drug, so you wind up using their dependency to take away more of their money and make them worse-off!”

Sounds about right to me. This doesn’t necessarily ignore “the fact that cigarette taxes are as much about discouraging potential or casual smokers from taking up a heavy habit.” It just means we must balance the additional misery we are going to impose on cigarette addicts with the benefits of less new smokers and less need for revenues from other sources.

Of course we also need to consider the extent to which the measure actually does result in the desired effect. If the measure has the side-effect without actually having the desired effect, I would say it is basically just cruelty.

In the case of cigarette taxes, people probably do notice the price of cigarettes when considering whether to buy that first pack. So it is probably somewhat effective. I think measures (like smoking bans indoors) meant to (rightly) allow non-smokers to avoid second hand smoke have done more to reduce smoking, by creating an environment where it is easier for people to naturally socially ostracize smokers (they have to stand outside while all the clean people are having fun inside). But, cigarette taxes have likely helped to some extent.

In the case of tax credits related to children, I really just can’t see it. Do you think people are really going to consider the tax implications when making the decisions that lead to single parenthood?

“Damn, I’m really horny and want to have unprotected sex with this person, but I better keep my cool or risk missing out on that tax credit 5 years down the line.”

“I really don’t like being around her, and have no idea how to be a father, and feel like my life will be over if I settle down, but hey what about that tax credit? I better stick around”

“Hmmm, well I’m not really comfortable with the idea of getting an abortion, but if I abort this one then I’ll be more likely to get a ring and the all-important tax credit”

What I think I’m getting at is that the group of people who become single parents or become non-parents of their kids is the exact same group that doesn’t spend much time pondering the tax implications of their actions.

When it comes to Brooks’ marijuana column, I think it is you who has read something other than what was written. Brooks specifically criticized the repeal of criminal laws regarding marijuana in certain States precisely because the law is a moral teacher. He was not merely saying that, as a thing to encourage or discourage informally, pot is a dead end, etc. No, he was saying that because pot, in his view, is a dead end, etc, the move to repeal the criminal laws against its use and possession are a mixed blessing, at best.

Which is just a roundabout, NY Times, fancy Dan way of saying that the criminal laws are justifiable. In other word, while not defending the incredibly, insanely harsh Rockefeller laws, Brooks was defending continued criminalization of the use and possession of marijuana. And that’s why the libertarian/liberal/youthful internet, which favors legalization much more than the general population, skewered him.

Really, there are only three choices…continued criminalization, laissez faire, no rules, sell-the-pot-to-anyone including kids just like potato chips and candy bars, or some regime of regulation, which, inevitably, will resemble that in place for tobacco and/or alcohol. Anything more “subtle” than that is unnecessarily and deceptively complicated, rather than complex. Should folks go to jail or otherwise face criminal sanction for smoking pot? Yes or no. If yes, then you favor the current set up, more or less. If no, then you in all probability favor some sort of regulatory regime (as almost no one favors the laissez faire approach).

What Brooks is going on about, if he does not favor continued criminalization, is beyond me. Of course, no one is going to say that it is a good idea to be stoned your whole life. Just like no one is going to say it is good to be drunk all your life. Or to live only to gamble, or to eat yourself into obesity, or use tobacco at all. But, in Brooks’ stacked deck, all MJ users are 24/7 stoners, which is not at all the case. Basically, Brooks either never really was a user, despite his phony sounding anecdote, or used only briefly. Because he and his buddies stopped using, or never used, and they are all high achievers (or think they are, anyway), then it must be the case that folks who do use are all Beavis and Butthead types for life. That many lawyers, judges, doctors, scientists, etc, etc, smoke MJ apparently is news to Brooks. So, not only is Brooks’ notions about criminalization wrongheaded, but even if his ideas can be seen as only relating to soft, social pressure, they are still misguided. Total abstinence is not called for, even without legal penalties.